IN THE SHADOW
while it fed and growled and glutted itself. If the degree of his thoughts had been registered and a piece of French glass let into the place occupied by the temporal bone the workings of this freakishly well-convoluted brain could have been no more evident. Ha, ha!" It was a remark rather than a laugh. "It is so with all of these primitive peoples; if one will but wait, the savage will show itself … just as one waits for a tiger on the edge of the jungle. It is only a question of time before these things break cover … like a boy playing with a diving bottle. … You know, Henry, a bottle weighted to its specific gravity plus; it bobs up in time and when it doesn't it stays down for good, and there is the end of the diving bottle and the aborigine, and money thrown into the ditch for an education … ha, ha."
Virginia listened, puzzled; the theory she understood of course, but not the man. Leyden appeared genuinely amused at the incident which he had just cited, yet she felt instinctively that he was not a cynic, a scoffer, or a "laughing philosopher." She could not know that with his views the sight of an aborigine aping a savant furnished the same amusement as might an ostrich attempting to fly to the top of a palm; it was the effort which amused him, not the failure.
As they walked toward the greenhouses Leyden rambled on lightly, his pleasing voice, with its clean-cut enunciation and faint hint of a foreign, or more properly, polyglot accent, lightly sketching places, people, and things. Virginia listened with keen pleasure; she was too feminine not to be powerfully attracted by the subtle assurance of the winning voice, the mental clearness of the views portrayed from a source of such classic, mascu-
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